A little more than a year passed between the composition of Felix Mendelssohn's Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 1, of October, 1822, and his Piano Quartet in F minor, Op. 2, of November-December, 1823, and it was not an uneventful year so far as musical development was concerned. The whole of the F minor Piano Quartet breathes with a confidence and a maturity quite outside the lines of its accomplished but, yes, comparably juvenile C minor predecessor, a confidence quite extraordinary for a composer still just 14 years old. Opus 2, which was in fact the second Mendelssohn work ever to be published and thus the rightful possessor of that opus number (something relatively rare in composers' catalogs), is in the usual four movements and is dedicated to Mendelssohn's teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter.

One thing that hasn't changed from the Opus 1 piano quartet to this Opus 2 one is the virtuoso dominance of the pianist over his or her string-playing companions: the pianist's fingers still fly around as the strings offer more compact and considerably less flamboyant bits—but bits which sometimes carry the real thematic weight of the piece, and which are thus anything but contemptible!

Allegro molto is the tempo of the first movement; the primary and secondary thematic ideas (i.e., A and B themes in the sonata-allegro context) are spun out from quietly lyrical spindles, though each eventually grows more forceful as things move along. The violist gets a chance to sing in its high register during the exposition of the second theme. Cantabile, sweet-toned D flat major is the home of the Adagio that follows. Its ravishing tune is presented by the piano, which then gracefully commits it to the strings. The rolling piano figurations heard throughout the middle of the movement are pure early-Romanticism. Rather than scherzo in the proper sense, young Mendelssohn provides an Intermezzo for the third movement. The whiplash-inducing Allegro molto vivace finale will likely come as a delight to the string players, who at last are placed on (almost) equal virtuoso footing with their keyboardist companion.

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